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Should we go bigger?

Propeller Communications
posted 2014-12-22 22:50:48

Hey, Something I've been trying to dois justify breaking away from the 600px frame that all mailers seem to use, Looking at my personal inbox I get emails from the Playstation which are 800px wide and then a fair few with are 700px wide. This raises the question of is 600 the right width still?

I thought a lot about this when we made our weekly email template, mainly because I wanted to try something different.

What we ended up making was a template that's 100% wide by default, up to 960px, with certain sections topping out at 640px. That means that the email is effectively responsive everywhere, so even in Gmail etc. it will resize a bit if the email-viewport is, say 700px. That said, in terms of design, there's no text that spans a full 960px - I think that's too much - but it means we can have some nice 300px "card" style layouts in three columns instead of two.

oddly, I was on the team that first made the PS emails 800px, at least in the UK. The rationale was that Outlook wasn't even a consideration, and also at the time, neither was mobile. Didn't realise they still are, but in that short few years where screens were big enough and mobile wasn't important enough, it made good sense.

as an aside - we go for 640px wide quite a lot, as up until recently it made math/retina images easy to think about for 320px wide iPhone screens. 640 also seems to work nicely with some of the common font sizes to give a nice type measure.

Looking at this quickly if you screen resolution is 1366x768 (which I think is the most common these days) Gmail will show about 805px wide.
By that reckoning yeah it's fine to do 800px wide. I'm using a tiny example here but with some research it could be scaled up.

My main concern would be an 800px wide email without any mobile optimisation, which I've seen a few of on my phone. Make sure you test extensively in the gmail app.

one email client that comes to my mind where you will have issues if you go much wider than 600px is Yahoo Mail. They have those ads on the right which limit a lot the email real estate. I think you can go max 650, everything else will be cut off in Yahoo.

If you use the hybrid coding approach and your layout is very modular you can work in multiples of 320px. You can mix things up by having different widths for each module that will stack in different ways on mobile. For example you could do something like:

I would question why you feel the need to go bigger? I mean with regards to playstation as an example I often look at their emails from an email developer POV and as they do not take on responsive design and their emails are image heavy, I don't personally look up to them on the email side...in fact I probably do the opposite.

It's more for replicating our sites we do to a closer degree, a lot of sites we build are now using a 1280px grid as opposed to the old 960px. We've had a few clients ask why there is such a size difference between their site and mailer, because their email is less than half the size of their site.